What is a digital library? The social impact of information artifacts

The term 'digital library" is used as a generic name for many kinds of digital collections, making it difficult to build a cumulative understanding of what has been learned from different kinds of technical projects to digitize, organize, search and preserve digital documents. This paper classifies digital libraries by looking at the social impact of information artifacts, using data on the amount of information produced annually in different storage formats, as well as concepts derived from the sociology of innovation. At least four types of digital libraries can be derived by this method: (1) digitized documents from analog media; (2) "born digital" documents; (3) digital data; and (4) archives of network communications.